This is an ABC podcast. Hi, Brett Kirky. Welcome to Mindful E. Put your hand up if you know this scenario.
You're sleep deprived. Your children have woken up during the night. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture. And what about, like you've got one child here, I have Brett Footy.
The other ones who dropped the gymnastics, I have the other side of town. Sometimes your children get sick. They're preparing for exams. Lunchbox will be packed.
Homelocks will be done. What about Book Week? Every year, Book Week, you've got to get school dressed up to organise. And they're calendar.
Birthday parties all the time are coming at you. I know the feeling. My wife and I have five kids. Yep, five.
That's a lot. And on this series of Mindful E together, we're going to get a happier and karma home. Mindfully, creating a karma and happier you. Maggie Dainty is a parenting author and educator, and she thinks practising mindfulness at home can make a huge difference to parents and kids.
Now Maggie, why should we practise mindfulness at home? Well, let's look at our world that we live in now. It's sped up. And the things that now attack our senses, at paces and speeds and frequency that we didn't have before, means that the nervous system is wound up.
And then what happens is we don't have opportunities to discharge the extra tension in our nervous systems. There's almost too much information. There's too much stimuli. There's too much pressure.
And then all of those things together make us become ungrounded. So mindfulness brings us back into this moment, into our body, into now, and what is really happening. And just small pockets of that throughout family life can resettle us and make us much nicer human beings. Talking about families, I've got a family of five, so it's crazy chaos at times and organised chaos studies.
What about for mum's that say, I just don't have time to mindful? It's unbelievably common. And if I can unplug a little bit about how what most of us women tend to function is that we are the organisers. Our cascading mind can't stay mine for all the time because we're going, oh, it's almost time for pick up.
We'll have it done the last night of washing. Maybe I'll cook that for dinner at 10 instead of this thing. We don't ever stop because we actually have to be in the future to organise. So we can't always be present.
We review every single thing we do. That's why we do our own heads in. We're laying wake at two o'clock going, oh my gosh, they did need broccoli today. I'm a terrible mum.
Yeah, judging all the time. Always. And we're so hard on ourselves. So, you know, let good enough be good enough.
You know, chaos is actually normal for young children. They're not good at keeping things neat and tidy. But if you relax a little around that, maybe sometimes sit on the couch with a cup of tea or whatever does it. And just observe, you will find your kids are doing really interesting stuff.
And they won't be running around trying to annoy you because you're actually there. And before you know it, you're in a really mindful place. And you're able to get back up and make some choices that are from scattered thinking. They're from focused thinking.
And so, practising that mindfulness technique, do you see that as sort of role modelling then to your children? That's a no question. Just getting a habit of doing three breaths more often just before you drive the car you're pausing you do. Yep.
And the kids when you first start doing, what are you doing now? What are you doing? I'm just getting myself centered and calm. And before you know it, they'll be going, oh, they'll say, Mommy, you need to take three breaths.
So we are incredibly influential. We know that happy calm children learn better and are kinder. More stressed moms are, the more stressed the children will pick up. So I think when we prioritise taking care of us, we're showing our children that we matter.
And sometimes our expectations of children can be just a little bit too high. You know, they take ages to self-regulate. They take ages to be able to remember to wash their hands after the day. So they take ages not to get frustrated when someone is taking one of their toys.
But I always think of this formula that says E plus R equals O. And it's any event or experience plus my reaction to it creates the outcome. With mindfulness, we change the R. Yes.
Ground yourself, take a breath before you react and respond and look at your child. They're not doing it to make me angry. They're doing it because they're overwhelmed or frustrated. Yeah.
Or too young to understand the consequences. They are learning how to navigate all those life experiences and where their teachers and guides. Can you be what your child needs right now? What can we do as a family together?
When we have a conversation with our children when they're calm again. So never ever try and have a conversation about what they've done wrong in the heat of the moment. You can't hear anything in a red room. You've got to allow that sense of calmness to come.
And when that happens, especially if we facilitate it, I say, okay, we're going to talk about it when everyone's calm. You're also teaching them that the heat of the moment is not a time to respond. Yeah. Right.
So you're modeling it. You'll be able to have that conversation saying, so what do you think it was that made you get so angry so quickly? With the words, because teasing words hurt, don't they? And then we have a conversation about words we use that can hurt others.
So it becomes a teachable moment for our children rather than, I will punish you so you don't do that. Instead, I'm going to say big ugly feelings are really valid. Validating emotions takes three quarters of the sting out of them. As children become better at understanding their big emotions, and we give them the tools to manage them, they leave their nervous system.
If we can step in with a mindful approach that says, okay, I'm going to help you understand what's going here. And what we could do next time. And they're able to regulate their own emotion. Absolutely.
There's one thing I think that we can continue to build our kids, and I don't sit in a lot of kids at school. Is resilience? Do you think mindfulness is something that can really help in space? Huge.
I tell you one really beautiful one that works really, really well for children, particularly before tests. Put your non-dominant hand out and do a little round around the garden really slowly. Imagine your hand is a two-year-old. Close your eyes.
That's a two-year-old hand. You go round and round and round and round and round the garden like a teddy bear. One step, two step. You can take yourself over if it's appropriate at the moment.
But what we find is that children who've had that done to them as a child will have an automatic endorphin rush. I was literally going back to my childhood. Exactly. Round and round the garden can work for growing ups and boring meetings.
Put your hand on your desk and your face will just endorphin rush and go, I don't know what she's going to do. There's no question that when we can lighten up around big sticky moments or we can be the ridiculous person. We can shift the mood and neurotransmitters in our children so quickly. So a house that's more mindful will be a more loving and fun place to be.
Isn't that what we all want? Exactly. And allow kids to be themselves. Because sometimes they're the actual circuit breakers when the moments are tense or there's grief or anything around your house.
Absolutely. They just stay in the moment. They can be great teachers. Exactly.
And I think the fact that you can think what can I do to calm down. You're already doing it. Because there's a lot of people listening to it, my friend has a meditation. It's a bit out there.
You're talking about really small things. And as I said, to start with breathing more. Thanks, Maggie. Mindfully with Brett Kirk.
Our other mindfulness champion is David Presenter, radio host, comedian, author and busy mum, Joe Stanley. Thank you, Joe, for coming in to share today. Thanks for having me. So I've heard you're really passionate about mindfulness.
How did this come about? I think it was most profound when I became a mother. And my daughter was quite unwell when she was born. So when you're sitting next to your baby in intensive care and you know, all of the fears and terrors that come with that can kind of make you unravel.
Meditation was really important to me. And mindfulness kind of came from that. And then as my daughter's grown and she's really healthy and amazing, you know, mindfulness is what children have just naturally. Like, that's just so present and so aware of what's happening.
And so I guess it just sort of evolved as a part of my parenting as well. And it's just everywhere. It's the part of how I live. And it allows me the perspective to find joy and gratitude in every day.
How do you use mindfulness at home? Well, I mean, I don't want to sound like I'm the delle alarm. I don't. It's not like I achieve this every day.
But I guess I have to acknowledge that I can't be with my daughter every minute that she's not at school. I'd like to be, but you know, we all have to work. But when I'm with her, then I want to be as present as possible with her. So then the phone is put down and we walk hand in hand home from school and I'll listen, actively listen to the words that she says.
And I love a mindful cooking, you know, I'll be cooking dinner and I hate cooking. I hate it. I hate that I have to do that every night. Every night I think to myself, why does the child need to be fed?
Because I don't enjoy it. But then I'm like, OK, well, let's actually mindfully engage with the practice of it. And I'm really enjoy. And I'm going, OK, well, you know, listen to the sound of the knife on the chopping boarders.
I'm cutting onions or, you know, like, I think that there are really beautiful moments of mindfulness in your day-to-day activities that can really slow down and change the perspective. Yeah. So what makes you stop to actually make you aware of the chopping and those types of things? I guess I just remind myself to do that.
Because otherwise I will probably sit around hoping about the fact that I hate it so much. And here we are again doing it again. And, you know, like, you've got a choice, don't you? You've got a choice to get really over the day-to-day domesticity of life or you've got a choice to be grateful for it.
And to really engage with it and go, well, look, here we are cooking dinner again. Aren't we lucky? Yeah. So you're talking about choices?
Is that something to speak to your daughter about as well? Yeah, we do sort of talk about, OK, well, babe, you are winging about the fact that you've got swimming this morning and you don't want to go. So let's talk about what's your choice? Your choice is to hate it and really make it even harder for yourself or your choice is to really embrace it and say, oh, well, you know, I can get in the water and feel that on my skin.
And I can really love mucking around with my friends. And do you see the changes in her and yourself in terms of your relationship? I do. I see a change when we are a bit, you know, life's busy and I get distracted and I get cranky and I get tired.
And then we will remind each other somehow of like usually her saying, mommy, why are you so cranky? And that reminds me to slow down and say, OK, no, you're right. So they don't want the intensity. Do you think that's a byproduct of mindfulness?
Yeah, I do. I don't know that she would be aware of it. I mean, she's the school that she goes to have been working with smiling mind and they've had mindfulness workshops there. I was lost my temper in traffic one day.
No, you did. So she told me off of swearing and then she said, mommy, your monkey mind has taken control. And so then she taught me through the breathing exercise that they do at school to calm their monkey mind and to take them from one side of the rainbow over to the good side of the rainbow. Great.
Explain my monkey mind for the people that don't know what you're talking about. Why your monkey mind is the thinking mind that takes over, the thinking mind that is swinging from Trader Tree and Branch to Branch and just never still and creates that churning in your head. That means that you're stressed and angry and anxious and then you lash out and then you yell at the person who just cut your off in traffic and you use very bad language with your eight-year-old in the back of the car going. How wonderful is it?
How wonderful is it? What's your daughter's having those conversations with you? It's amazing. Yeah, sometimes I think of mindfulness as a powerboard whereas if you plug too many things into it, the safety switch goes, pop, goes off and then you need to re-start, you need to recharge.
But I think that it's a practice because you have to practice it and I think if you're very first introduced to mindfulness, it's quite a strange thing to go, okay, I've got to recognise it, so there's the steps here, I've got to recognise it in my body and then I've got to investigate it and I've got to acknowledge it and investigate it without any shame or blame. And then I've got to, you know, there's a few steps to it. Yeah, and you talked about learning about yourself. So you'd say that it's made a big difference in your home?
Oh yeah, it's just karma, I guess. It's a karma space. We kind of have a language that's really calm and gentle and the stillness is really beautiful between us. I think it just informs everything else that you do and certainly for us it just makes probably makes Mummy a nicer person to live with.
That's always cool. And what would you say to someone who until now has thought mindfulness is a bit out there? So that I guess I say, it's definitely not sitting around underneath a triangle, you know, saying on for half an hour every day, which you can if you've got time for that, amazing. Whatever you want to.
I think mindfulness can be practiced as you walk. You know, if you walk five minutes every day, do mindfulness then. It doesn't need to be sitting down. You know what?
I love a mindfulness shower. Like if you're standing there and feeling actually feeling what that water feels like when it's on your face or on your body. That's just a beautiful moment to start your day. So I think people expect too much of themselves to begin with.
Thank you so much, Joe. Love the conversation. Thanks, Brad. Me too.
Well, let's start getting our homes calmer and happier. There are four smiling mind-minitations for you to listen to. And check out our series on sport and work too, if you haven't already. I'll catch you soon for another series of Mindfully when we look at how our kids can really benefit from practicing mindfulness.
You can find Mindfully in the ABC Listen app, or you can subscribe, you know iTunes, or wherever else you get your podcasts from. And if you've got friends and family, or even a neighbour who might also enjoy a bit of calm at home, let them know about Mindfully. Mindfully is brought to you by the ABC Audio Studios. The producer is Laura McCullough, and the executive producer is Justin Kelly.